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I really hope The Familiar is good. Only Revolutions was much more of a slog to get through than House of Leaves and I can't help but be suspicious of a 27 volume book - please be good, please be good.

On topic, Feersum Endjinn. I'm not sure why I'd put off trying his non-culture scifi for so long but it certainly is good. The phonetic chapters seem like a bit of a novelty so far though, even if they are much easier to read than expected.

It's also a great change of pace from Atlas Shrugged, which was not enjoyable. The basic story in there was decent enough but it went on far, far too long and wasn't worth the time at all. Oh well, at least I don't need to be curious about it anymore.

Yeah, I bounced right off Only Revolutions and while the few pages I've read of The Fifty Year Sword so far were interesting, the colors used to designate different characters are so similar that my eyes started to hurt.

Yeah, I bounced right off Only Revolutions and while the few pages I've read of The Fifty Year Sword so far were interesting, the colors used to designate different characters are so similar that my eyes started to hurt.

For some reason I'd confused The Fifty Year Sword with the Whalestoe Letters and assumed it was just more cuts from House of Leaves. A real physical book no less! I suspect my e-reader atrophied arms will not to be happy with such things.

Just finished A Dance with Dragons. Enjoyed it more than the previous book. It feels like the Ice and Fire universe is beginning to contract rather than keep expanding, and the ending is in sight, though still many leagues away to the point where you have to wonder how George is supposed to wrap everything up in only two more books (probably split into two parts each like this one was). I was concerned before purchasing when the reviews painted it as a continuation of uninterestingness from the previous book, but I liked it. *Shrug* With a few nitpicks of course. A couple of times characters end up bumping into each other half the world away through staggering coincidence.

Re-reading(?) "The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time" by Mark Haddon, I read this years back in secondary school and found my old copy then decided to give it another read and what a fantastic story it is.

A casual non-fiction about 2010 US equity market's well known "Flash Clash", the largest single day drop of US stock market. I've read 8 chapters out of 24. While it seems to be something like trading machines went out of order, like what happened in 1987, some suspected that the event was actually orchestrated by some sophisticated traders, who have been abusing the market with computing technology inaccessible by most retail investors, to profit from rubbing those poor retail investors, those often referred as High-frequency Traders. In stead of being appreciated as tech-savvy, they are portrayed as notorious in this book, at least up to chapter 8 as I have read. I still have over half of the book unfinished but can't wait to share with you this great read.

Recently when someone said "dog shaman ex-corp runs the shadows" I drew a complete blank. Wasn't 'til much later I thought "Only the very first Shadowrun novel!" My mind seems to be slipping away.

Into The Shadows is an anthology of short stories, linked but independent, and is pretty awesome. 2XS and Burning Bright are also thematically linked and make a good pair. Steel Rain was good but didn't really go anywhere. Stick with Twist (heh) through the trilogy, it's pretty good.

Does the quality remain the same? Because right now (Twist just met the sasquatch) I'm just reading it to finish it. I wanted to get into the spirit of things before the game dropped but so far I think I am 0 for 2 and might just move on.

About the same. 2XS and Burning Bright are among the best of the Shadowrun books, but my recollection of the whole series is, in all honesty, coloured quite heavily by nostalgia and none of them are exactly scintillating.

'Medie kultur, Medie samhälle' by Jostein Gipsrud.. Media Culture and Media Society would be the title in english, not a very fun reading. I can never find the enthusiasm to read fiction anymore, maybe some day when I'm finished with School and have forgotten the dreads of academic reading.

Another unpleasant duty trip to Hong Kong turns out to be surprisingly rewarding. After I visited the computer hardware arcades in ShamShuiPo (a lot of westerners know this place too. I see many westerners everytime I go there) yesterday afternoon (typical IT arcades in HK don't start business hours before noon), I walked along to Cheung Sha Wan (a business district where mainly textile and fashion trading firms of Hong Kong are concentrated in), I found some used book stores to have surprisingly great stocks of both English and Chinese books. Over here used book stores are not exactly thriving businesses. Yes people are all crazy about reading, but we are all welcoming only brand new books because books here are generally cheap (yes, I mean cheap, most are printed in toilet paper, how do you expect the form they are in after some months of reading for us to resell? Quite an effective form of DRM on printed materials). Problem is that you don't have much chance to find a book which is out-of-print. Hong Kong, on the other hand, has quite a thriving used book business. People there also love reading, yet they welcome both new and second hand book.

Only that the book shop I visited yesterday had very bad ventilation. Those fungi smell. And hell I almost suffocated. But I bought a translated Economic thriller from Japan, about office politics of a large, family controlled enterprise.

Plus, I found a small science book store (not selling used books, this one sells new books) offering all texts and magazines in science and technology inside a smaller IT arcade. The arcade named Wonder Arcade. Man there are so many science and engineering texts which are so affordable. I hope it will remain in business for a long time. It's run by an old man.

One book left and isn't out yet. I can't even say if I like it yet. This better have a really dark and depressing ending. The main character is an arrogant asshole and deserves all the bad things that happened to him and are implied to happen later. If it ends bad for him, like it's implied, good. All good.

[...] but my recollection of the whole series is, in all honesty, coloured quite heavily by nostalgia and none of them are exactly scintillating.

I felt the same way when I went back and read some Dragonlance novels as an adult. Books that I loved as a young kid rang pretty hollow twenty five years later. It makes me wonder how I'll feel about books I'm reading now if I re-read them in the future. I would hope my taste for quality literature would improve over time, but who knows?

I felt the same way when I went back and read some Dragonlance novels as an adult. Books that I loved as a young kid rang pretty hollow twenty five years later. It makes me wonder how I'll feel about books I'm reading now if I re-read them in the future. I would hope my taste for quality literature would improve over time, but who knows?

Heh I read those for the first time when I was about 13-14 and even at the time, I knew they were pretty dire. Well apart from the Raistlin/Caramon saga, that was fun.